Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters by Mark Urban Page A

Headquarters announced success: ‘His Lordship [Sir Arthur Wellesley had lately received a peerage and taken the title Wellington] approves of your expending, for practice, as much ammunition as you may think proper, reporting from time to time to this office the quantity expended.’
    Shooting was one of those areas where the officers of the 95th had very particular views. Many of the battalion’s subalterns and even captains carried a rifle, whereas other officers, including in the red-coated battalions of the Light Brigade, considered that somewhat uncouth, for they regarded the sword as the only weapon truly becoming of a gentleman. Rifle officers justified their shooting prowess, and reconciled it with the gentility of rank, by portraying themselves as fellows who were simply bringing their love of sport to the battlefield.
    In the hands of a private soldier, the rifle presented an interesting social conundrum and one less easily explained away as sport. The regulations for riflemen which were central to the 95th’s training made it clear: ‘As soon as the rifleman has fixed upon his object, he fires without waiting for any command.’ Not only was the common rifleman made an arbiter of life and death, but the 95th was explicitly foundedto emulate those sharpshooters of the previous century’s American war who, ‘posted behind thickets, and scattered wide in the country, frequently picked off the officer, and galled and annoyed the King’s troops in their march’.
    By contrast, General Sir David Dundas, the author of the Rules and Regulations for the Army as a whole, an officer who had reached the summit of his profession in 1809 as the Commander in Chief, had spelt out that one of the purposes of his tract was ‘to enable the Commanding Officer … to be capable of restraining the bad effects of such ideas of independent and individual exertions as are visonary and hurtful’, and instead to foster ‘regulated obedience’. Dundas used his rules to impose a uniform system of drill on the British Army in the 1790s, one which was based on the Prussian school of Frederick the Great. Although most British officers recognised his achievement in imposing some kind of standardisation, by the early 1800s quite a few regarded Dundas and his regulations as a dead hand, holding the Army in a vice of formal, inflexible movements, slowing the evolution of light-infantry or rifle tactics.
    Dundas thought any large-scale skirmishing a ‘great danger’, something that might have ‘fatal consequences’. But many younger officers derided him as ‘Old Pivot’, a reference to his insistence on a slow system of manoeuvre practised by the Prussians in which companies of men turned on fixed points known as pivots. General Sir John Moore, for example, fumed about Dundas’s ‘damned eighteen manoeuvres’ and their stultifying effect. Moore had already set about subverting Dundas’s rules and regulations with new tactics introduced at Shorncliffe. The Guadiana plain contained representatives of both sides of the schism, between those who wanted all infantry to ‘ape grenadiers’ and others who wanted to free light troops from strict regulation. Craufurd, another admirer of Frederick the Great, was doing Dundas’s bidding. Beckwith believed that freeing the soldier’s spirit was essential. The great irony of it all was that Dundas, by a quirk of the Army’s patronage system, had ended up a few months earlier as the titular head or Colonel of the 95th Regiment. He thus skimmed a lucrative side income from the administration of the very regiment whose tactics in Spain would undermine some of his most cherished ideas.
    This tension between giving the rifleman power to kill on his own initiative and instilling complete obedience in the ordinary infantryman was resolved by generals and military theorists in two main ways.One was to stress the limited roles of the light-infantry soldier, and particularly riflemen, in combat. The